Food trucks are a great way for aspiring and up-and-coming restaurateurs to break into the restaurant business. In addition, established restaurants often start food trucks in order to reach new customers and add revenue streams. To maximize the potential of these popular restaurants on wheels, however, it’s important to install a food truck POS system that’s right for your business.

Ready to get a piece of the estimated $2.7 billion food truck market? Point of Sale recently broke down the key considerations for evaluating and selecting the right POS system for your truck.

Speed:

Food truck customers expect to order, pay and receive their food quickly. If your POS system is bottlenecking the process, they’ll get frustrated and find another truck.

Size:

It goes without saying, but there isn’t much extra room inside food trucks. Make sure to select a POS system that is lightweight, small in size, and connects with as few cables as possible.

Customization:

The beauty of food trucks is that they can be completely unique, both in food and in internal workflows. Find a POS system that can be customized to meet your needs.

Reporting:

As in any restaurant, it’s important that a food truck POS system has the capability to report on sales and inventory. You’ll also want to track performance by location, day and time, food offerings and more.

Loyalty:

Food truck fans love sharing their finds on social media. Take advantage of this excitement with a customer loyalty program. You can even tie your POS system into a CRM, creating a marketing list that will allow you to alert customers of your location, new products and more.

Connectivity:

Make sure your food truck POS system can still process payment even if you lose internet connectivity.

In busy restaurants, even the smallest inefficiencies can have a huge impact on the bottom line. But the day-to-day responsibilities and challenges of running a restaurant often leaves managers and owners little time to identify and correct those mistakes. This is where POS reports can help.

Collecting and understanding data on your restaurant’s sales, inventory, labor and more is essential to identifying issues and opportunities for improvement. Ultimately, this will help improve customer satisfaction, reduce waste and increase sales. A recent PointOfSale.com article details the POS reports that are essential to helping restaurants run more smoothly and profitably.

Sales

Analyze your sales from many different angles to identify trends. Depending on what your point of sale system provides, try to track sales by time period, by server, by number of guests, by table turn time and more.

Labor

Comparing two or more servers who work the same shifts will help you determine if a server is underperforming and why. In addition, comparing labor and sales reports will identify times in which there are too many or too few servers on the clock.

Inventory

Use inventory reports to track the use of ingredients during specified time periods. This will ensure that you can appropriately plan for the future and avoid running out of key ingredients.

Menu and Product Mix

This report shows which menu items are selling and which are not, helping to identify which items should be promoted and which should be changed or discontinued.

Exception

By showing refunds, discounts and voids, and which staff members performed them, you’ll be able to determine if employees need additional training. In addition, this can help to identify whether an employee may be stealing.

Coupons, Gift Cards and Loyalty Programs

This report will help determine whether coupons and loyalty programs are affecting your bottom line in a positive or negative way.

By utilizing and understanding POS reports, owners and managers will be able to improve restaurant performance, customer satisfaction, and sales. To learn how Retail Tech can help you update or implement new or refurbished POS equipment, give us a call at 1-877-580-9687.

On our point of sale blog, we’ve written extensively about the changing retail industry, discussing customers’ desire for engagement and personal connections when they shop. These shifts aren’t just present in retail environments – they’re occurring in restaurants as well. So what can restaurant owners and managers do to increase engagement and keep customers coming back?

A recent article on PointOfSale.com discusses four ways that restaurants can improve customer engagement using their point of sale (POS) systems. We’ll summarize those strategies below.

Loyalty Programs

By offering deals, incentives and special offers, and by engaging with customers in other meaningful ways, loyalty programs are an easy and effective way to reward customers for their loyalty – and to keep them coming back. The more you can offer a tailored and specific program, the better!

Online Reservations and Ordering

Customers will appreciate the flexibility and ease of online ordering and reservations, allowing them to do things on their own timeline and terms.

Eliminating Long Waits

Offering customers the ability to jump ahead in line can significantly improve retention by eliminating the wait during peak times. For example, allowing customers to order online and go right to the register when they arrive is a huge draw for busy families who are trying to get dinner on the table. In fact, it may even lead to increased sales, as satisfied customers order more!

Tableside Ordering and Payment

Giving staff and customers the ability to order and pay right at the table has many benefits. It decreases the likelihood of order errors, minimizes wait time for both food and the check, and leads to higher table turnovers and more guests.

If your restaurant point of sale system is in need of an upgrade, give Retail Tech a call. We carry a wide variety of POS systems, including monitors and printers. We can help you find the right solution for the unique needs of your business. Get in touch today!

Not only can a POS system do more than a traditional cash register, but it could also improve the efficiency, organization and overall function of a retail store or restaurant. This, in turn, could improve business operations, saving a significant amount of time, effort and money.

But how, specifically, can an efficient point of sale system improve performance and cut costs? A recent article on pointofsale.com discusses the benefits of a POS system for the bottom line.

Inventory Management

Point of sale systems allow for automatic inventory tracking instead of forcing employees to manually track the items that are added and removed from the retail store or restaurant inventory. Not only does this save a tremendous amount of time, but it eliminates the threat of human error. In addition, having a better handle on store inventory at all times will assist with loss prevention.

Reduced Data Entry

It’s important for retailers to capture customers’ information in order to follow up and reengage. If retailers and restaurants can enter this data just once, it will reduce register wait times and improve customer retention.

Better Use of Time

Instead of manually analyzing sales trends and item popularity, make a POS system do it for you! Not only will this save valuable manager time, but it will allow for a deeper dive into the numbers and the ability to adapt to trends with greater speed and agility.

Improved Organization

When a restaurant or retail store tracks sales, customers, inventory and trends manually, a lot of paper is used. In the busy retail industry, managers often don’t have time to implement and use a detailed filing system, leading to a disorganized office space, missing files and a general sense of chaos. With a POS system, all of those metrics are tracked and stored digitally, reducing clutter and the wasted time and energy that go with it.

Spring is on the way, which means that retail stores are launching new product lines and in-store displays focused on the upcoming summer months. Spring is a time for new beginnings, which offers a great opportunity to review and think your overall retail merchandising strategy and execution.

Doing so will revitalize your store’s look, and could lead to better customer engagement and higher sales. It may also be a good idea to refresh your point of sale equipment at the same time, which could help achieve those same goals.

In a recent article, PointofSale.com laid out five retail merchandising mistakes to avoid. We’ll discuss them below.

Making it difficult to find products

The shoppers of today are busy, and are probably coming into a store with a specific idea of what they’re looking for. Grouping like items together, adding signage, and posting a map of your store can help ease confusion and frustration.

Not having a merchandising plan

A good merchandising plan includes: a seasonal plan for each department, a budget for store fixtures and signage, and a merchandise planning system to maximize turn and minimize markdowns.

Failing to merchandise the checkout area

Leverage this potent sales zone by offering add-on products, and highlighting new and best-selling products behind the registers.

Not placing mirrors strategically

Did you know? Mirrors placed smartly throughout a store can improve customer behavior, reduce shoplifting, and make smaller spaces look larger.

Not reviewing merchandising performance

Much like you review your employees’ performance, it’s important to review the performance of your merchandising, signage and displays. Are they maximizing or hurting sales? How can they be improved? Use your point of sale system to run and analyze sales and inventory reports, which will help you find new and better ways to merchandise your store and increase sales.

As retailers work to improve store performance, Retail Tech is there to help with a wide variety of new and refurbished POS equipment. We offer installation and staging, PoS printer repairs, and more. Contact our POS systems specialists for help finding the perfect point of sale solution for your retail store.